Playacting
by Songs for a Solstice
Summary: Method acting or whatever, Quinn was sick to death of calling Rachel and getting 'Eva Péron' instead. So she went ahead and did a little method acting of her own – à la Eliza Doolittle.


******My contribution to the lovely Faberry fandom. Enjoy! 3**

* * *

Alright, so Quinn had been dealing with this for the last couple of weeks.

Really. She'd been dealing. She might have been a little annoyed at the fact that she had a lot of work to do, more work than she'd ever had in high school (but this was where she'd wanted to be since before she'd realised just what she wanted to do, and so work is fine), and yet every weekend, she was sure to meet up with the girl who'd somehow over the last year become her best friend.

But _this was it_. Because she was fine with meeting up with Rachel, and she was even more-or-less okay with the unending bizarreness that being friends with Rachel inevitably entailed.

(There was also the small matter of her being unfortunately madly in _love _with Rachel, but she hadn't dared ask if _Finchel _was still happening because not knowing if she had any hope was a lot safer and more pleasant than knowing she didn't have any.)

In any case, she was fine with meeting up with _Rachel_.

_Not. Goddamned. Eva. Péron_.

'"_Rachel_," she growled from between gritted teeth as she reflexively tightened her scarf further around her neck against the cold. "Seriously, you don't think you're sort of taking this a little overboard?"

Quinn's eyes flicked across to see Rachel turn towards her, imperious little smirk tugging at the corner of those full lips.

_Don't look at her mouth, don't look at her mouth_, Quinn chanted to herself, forcing her eyes away.

"Please, Miss Fabray, my name is not Rachel, and you are aware of this."

_Your name is Rachel Berry, you idiot, and you take method acting to a whole new level of crazy, and my life is a Shakespearean tragedy_. "I do believe I've corrected you before, but I'll allow" _she's going to get this part_, she thought grimly, _she's doing 'obnoxious noble bitch' perfectly_, "for the emotional distress the…altercation…from before must have left upon you."

"_Altercation_?" Quinn snapped, pivoting to glare at her friend. "_Altercation_?"

Rachel frowned. "Really, Quinn," she said in an admonishing tone, sounding for the first time in _three weeks _like Rachel Berry rather than an Argentinian politician's wife, "there's no need to be like that-"

"You just got us kicked out of my favourite restaurant, _Rachel_!"

Before she could embarrass herself further, she turned and walked away, fuming.

* * *

This was so completely a waste of energy and time and _thought _but she couldn't help, as she was waiting in the corridor outside the theatre room the next morning, playing the voicemail message Rachel had left over and over again.

"_It's possible that I may have, in some small way, overreacted to the waitress dropping a knife within a metre of my shoe. But really, Quinn, this behaviour is quite immature_. _You know how important playing…_" she could practically _see _'must-stay-in-character Rachel' warring with 'must-finish-this-sentence-coherently Rachel' "_...this role would be to anyone sane, and I know sanity hasn't always quite been your department in the past-_"

Even on the fifth try, that was about as far as Quinn could get into the message before she had to cut it off or risk breaking her phone.

"Hey, Quinn…" Azira started to call out, trailing off as she got closer to Quinn (obviously, close enough to see something not-right with her expression). "Dude, you okay?" she asked squinting in a way that Quinn used to think was indicative of some sort of serious eye condition, till she realised that it was what passed for _concerned expression _in Azira's mind.

(Sometimes, it surprised her that Azira was one of the best actors in the course.)

"I'm fine," she said, making her smile as sincere as possible.

From the way Azira muttered "if you say so…" with more than a touch of dubiousness in her tone, she didn't quite manage to pull it off.

"Oh!" her friend exclaimed suddenly, "I almost forgot! Apparently they're doing _Pygmalion _next year for spring quarter, you in for auditions?"

Quinn shrugged, looking down at her phone again. No new messages. In the last two minutes.

Rachel obviously wasn't too happy with her.

"I'm not sure," she said absent-mindedly, flicking through her text messages (about 80% of which were from Rachel), "it's not really my sort of play. And Eliza isn't really…"

She stopped midsentence, staring at her phone.

_So apparently NYADA has made the excellent decision (if I do say so myself) to put on a production of the famous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical _Evita_, you may have heard of it, and auditions aren't for another four weeks but I _must-

"I'm in," Quinn said, and this time there was nothing forced about her smile at all.

* * *

It took Rachel (_no, my name is not Rachel, I am the beautiful, glamorous, and completely heterosexual Eva Péron_) all of about five minutes to find herself simultaneously impressed and utterly frustrated by Quinn.

Or _Eliza_, as she insisted her name was through a barely-coherent accent and husky (no, husky was the wrong word, far too sexual (_and completely accurate_), _rough _was the word she was looking for) voice.

And as if the way she was speaking wasn't bad enough…it looked as though Quinn had picked out some of Finn's old clothes, given them to a couple of _pigs _to throw a minor party with, and then torn holes through them with a filleting knife before throwing them on.

Inside-out.

(They certainly smelled the part, in any case.)

Eva Péron found herself forced to draw upon every inch of Rachel Berry's normally unlimited fount of fondness for Quinn Fabray (and tolerance for Eliza Doolittle) in order to not wrinkle her nose and make more explicitly rude jibes about dirty peasants.

It was _harder _than she thought.

At least, Rachel thought, slightly more cheerfully, this would give her the perfect excuse to ask Quinn out on a _proper _date. Meeting up for lunch and occasionally dinner at least three times a week was lovely, but Rachel's fathers had brought her up better than that.

(And then maybe she'd finally have the chance to see if 'husky' translated to the bedroom, too.)

* * *

As for Quinn, borrowing some of Azira's boyfriend's clothes, taping them on the muddy street on an absolutely miserable day of torrential rain to be both figuratively and literally hacked at by oncoming traffic was completely worth it.

Even if she spent the entirety of their lunch wishing desperately that Rachel would stop making _that _expression (yes, _that _one, the one that made her look adorably lost and out of her depth, and when Rachel got the part of Eva and Quinn finally had an excuse to ask her out on a real date, not a platonic date like the millions they'd been having, she was going to relish being able to kiss that expression off of her face.)

It was even worth the smell.


End file.
